Tag Archive: foss

I was thinking that it could be cool if this meetup would theme around open source. I feel that folks in Israel are using an enormous amount of open source software but contribution and leadership is somewhat lacking. There is very small amount of open source projects actually initiated and led in Israel and it is not common for a start-up or larger companies to actually contribute to open source libraries that they use. I also know that people who believe in open source are usually the best hackers and that it would be cool to gather some of them in the same room.

The meetup was great. There were about 70 participants (it took about 24 hours for all spots to be filled) and about 12 people presenting (!).

You can check out the ustream feed from the session (quality is not that good…)

Thought it could be useful to share some refs to the decks/talks/people/projects with people who could not attend.

Not so lonely…

@idangazit (Idan Gazit) gave an amazing talk titled The Lonely Planet Guide to Open Source Communities. The deck was freaking b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l (if you saw any of Idan’s work you know it’s always beautiful) and the presentation gave a friendly introduction to how open source communities work from Idan’s experience and open source in general. You should definitely check out the deck.

500K users

Following Idan’s talk, @gidgreen (Gideon Greenspan) showed off a little project he was working on called Question2Answer, which is an open source platform for building Q&A websites. He built this platform all by himself and open sourced it and it became extremely popular very rapidly. Currently it runs more than 6,000 Q&A sites around the world with a registered user base of 500,000! I must say that this is a great example of the power of open source and the ability to make a difference with software.

Microsoft and Open Source?

@yosefd (Yosef Dinerstein) from Microsoft presented anode, which is an open source platform for hosting node.js apps. The platform is developed within Microsoft and runs on top of the Azure cloud.

All the libraries published as part of this project are available on Github and use the MIT license.

The githubbers panel

@ashevat (Amir Shevat) hosted an extended panel with folks doing open source day-to-day. Naturally, lots of interesting religious discussions about everybody’s favorite software stacks. The beauty of this world is that there’s no single answer that and everyone can decide on their own mix of stuff they use and love.

+1s go to Django, Rails and node.js on the web frameworks. Scala was favorable as well. -1s for Java and .NET and even for PHPwith claims around a poorly designed langauage quite a lot of bad advice from a vast community of web developers.

On the database front, hackers love MySQL, Redis and Riak. Oracle big expensive enterprise databases are off limits and there was an interesting discussion about MongoDB which some of the folks love and some feel that it’s not ready for heavy production use.

Show me the money

Following the panel, @adambn (Adam Benayoun) from binpress gave a useful talk about commercial aspects of open source. He listed the various license types and provided some interesting approaches on how real companies make money off of open source. Here’s a link to his deck.

Adam also talked a little about binpress which is a marketplace for software components they are building. Binpress helps people who publish software make money by taking care of the commercial side.

We finished up with a few more quick introductions to open source projects.

@emeshbi (me) presented uijs which is an open source system for building mobile web apps based on the HTML5 canvas. It is in early stages and we are looking for folks interested in participating in the first steps of building this project. It is MIT licensed and hosted on Github.

Reversim – Israeli tech podcast

@rantav (Ran Tavory) referred everyone to his podcast called Reversim which is a super popular Hebrew podcast about software in Israel.